I've actually read about the molly houses and thought they were referring to homosexuality, but I was confused. Is male one sex, female another, and lumping both male and female homosexuals together as the third sex? In my mind, there are more sexes than that.
I think it's saying that there's a 'third' way (or to my mind that would be a second way : straight - gay).
In the pulp novel pictured I think they used it as a generally well known euphemism because maybe 'Gay' wasn't being used in that way when it was published.... Of course (so the legend goes) in 19th Century England homosexuality only applied the males as Queen Victoria supposedly refused to believe that women could 'do that kind of thing', hence Lesbianism was never outlawed here..... So maybe gay Men where the 2nd sex and lesbians became the 3rd sex.....? Maybe..... [muses]
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The 3rd sex?
I've found the phrase used a lot in lesbian pulp. Here's an explanation from Wiki:
Some writers suggest that a third gender emerged around 1700 AD in England: the male sodomite. According to these writers, this was marked by the emergence of a subculture of effeminate males and their meeting places (molly houses), as well as a marked increase in hostility towards effeminate and/or homosexual males. People described themselves as members of a third sex in Europe from at least the 1860s with the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and continuing in the late nineteenth century with Magnus Hirschfeld, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Aimée Duc and others. These writers described themselves and those like them as being of an "inverted" or "intermediate" sex and experiencing homosexual desire, and their writing argued for social acceptance of such sexual intermediates.
I've actually read about the molly houses and thought they were referring to homosexuality, but I was confused. Is male one sex, female another, and lumping both male and female homosexuals together as the third sex? In my mind, there are more sexes than that.
I think it's saying that there's a 'third' way (or to my mind that would be a second way : straight - gay).
In the pulp novel pictured I think they used it as a generally well known euphemism because maybe 'Gay' wasn't being used in that way when it was published.... Of course (so the legend goes) in 19th Century England homosexuality only applied the males as Queen Victoria supposedly refused to believe that women could 'do that kind of thing', hence Lesbianism was never outlawed here..... So maybe gay Men where the 2nd sex and lesbians became the 3rd sex.....? Maybe..... [muses]
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